Limited Options

Toward the end of last week’s Senate hearing on American military action in Syria, Tim Kaine, of Virginia, admitted to being confused. Secretary of State John Kerry had been repeating for hours the Administration’s line that the purpose of bombing Syria was “limited”: to punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing more than a thousand of his own people, including hundreds of children, and to discourage him from doing it again. On the other hand, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tersely acknowledged that the act of destroying Syrian military assets would inevitably hurt Assad’s ability to fight the rebellion—so the effects might not be so limited after all. Meanwhile, the American goal in Syria remains a negotiated settlement. Since no one from the Administration would connect the dots, Kaine struggled to do it. Bombing, he offered, “will level the playing field by removing the ability to use chemical weapons, and it will therefore increase the odds that the parties will then come to the table to try to figure out that political solution.” He went on, “Is that the connection between the military option you are proposing and the stated end goal of a solution to the civil war only being—only being achieved through a political end?” “It’s the collateral connection to it,” Kerry replied. “It’s not the purpose of it, but it is a collateral connection.”

The Administration’s case for making Assad pay is as practically flawed as it is morally defensible. The war-weary American people overwhelmingly oppose it, and the debate in Washington is not winning them over to President Obama’s side. There’s also a problem with the debate itself: Obama seems to be reserving the right to ignore Congress if it fails to deliver the verdict he wants, which has led Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, to accuse the Administration of “making a joke of us.” In the meantime, a number of Republicans talk about the Syria crisis as if it were an overseas extension of the debt crisis—another chance to thwart a President they despise. The geopolitics of military action are just as problematic: the United States, supported by a handful of mostly silent partners, is upholding a collective standard single-handedly, and preserving the mission of the United Nations by ignoring it.

It would be less difficult to wave off these contradictions if the Administration seemed to have a plan for the day after the last cruise missile takes out the last Syrian jet. But the flaws start to appear fatal when you consider the lack of any strategy beyond bombing. It’s a worrying sign when America’s chief diplomat refers to the central objective in Syria as “a collateral connection.” The Administration would like to frame missile strikes as a kind of judicial action, a one-time ruling from the bench, not as a military intervention. Yet bombing would change the balance of power in Syria and, one way or another, entangle America in the civil war despite Obama’s ardent wish to stay out. The White House clearly failed to plan for a mass chemical-weapons attack; it would now be far better for the Administration to think through ways of reaching American goals before the missiles launch.

For almost two years, the U.S. has conducted a barely perceptible, utterly futile diplomatic exercise with Russia. Vladimir Putin has frustrated every effort to negotiate a ceasefire and a political transition in Syria, and now Russia is preventing the U.N. from even condemning the use of chemical weapons. Russia has relatively little invested in Syria, and it wants nothing from the U.S.—the war is just a cheap way for Putin to damage American interests. The clearest path to a settlement now may be not through Moscow but through Tehran. Iran has a lot at stake in Syria—in money, arms, lives, and regional strategy. The Revolutionary Guard has always tried to carry out foreign policy with no fingerprints, through proxies and covert operations, but Syria is becoming an Iranian quagmire.

The Obama Administration has refused to allow Iran a seat at the Geneva talks, but Iran has a new President, Hassan Rouhani, a seemingly pragmatic centrist whose top priority is to ease tensions with the U.S. and to end Iran’s international isolation. He and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, issued conciliatory tweets on the Jewish New Year, while former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rouhani’s political patron, dared to blame Assad for the chemical attack. During the Iran-Iraq War, tens of thousands of Iranians were gassed by the forces of Saddam Hussein. It’s conceivable that the atrocity in Damascus has turned the stomach of Iran’s political leadership. In the wake of American strikes, Iranian radicals might want to retaliate—there are reports of a secret order to attack the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or Beirut—and restraining them would be the first test of Rouhani’s power to carry out his agenda.

Some Iranians point to the Bonn Conference of 2001—where Iran and the U.S. coöperated in the formation of an Afghan government, after the fall of their mutual enemy, the Taliban—as a model for what might take place with Syria. The U.S. and Iran have a common interest: preventing Salafi extremists, affiliated with Al Qaeda, from gaining power in the region. If this appeared probable in Syria, Iran might be willing to drop its support for Assad in exchange for a face-saving transition, backed by Turkey, Jordan, and the Gulf states: a ceasefire, a peacekeeping force made up of Muslim troops from the region, protections for Alawites and other minorities, U.N.-sponsored elections, and exile in a comfortable dacha for the Assad family.

None of this is likely. It would take imaginative diplomacy of the kind that the Administration has shown little taste for in the Middle East. Iran would have to be convinced that it can’t win but also that it needn’t lose, and this would not be possible without deeper American engagement. The question of arming rebel groups came up at the Senate hearings. “The opposition has increasingly become more defined by its moderation,” Kerry said, “by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process.” Yet this version of Iraqi “sweets and flowers” is contradicted by accounts of rebel brutality, and by a new report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which describes fractured rebel forces that are increasingly dominated on the battlefield by hard-core Salafists. The fact that promised American weapons have been so slow to reach the rebels suggests that U.S. intelligence shares this view. Nonetheless, one of the report’s authors, Andrew Tabler, an American with long experience in Syria, argues that, with careful vetting, U.S. arms, along with political support in border areas, could still strengthen the more secular nationalist rebels. Without some such effort, the war looks more and more like a choice between Assad and Al Qaeda.

This strategy carries tremendous risks and few prospects for a resolution. There’s an easier case to be made for doing nothing—letting the war burn on for years. That policy would have the virtue of being clear and consistent, which cannot be said of what the Administration seems poised to do. But fires are hard to contain. The conflict is already spreading to Lebanon, Iraq, and perhaps the wider region. In the end, there’s no way for a conflagration in the Middle East to spare American interests. ♦